{"id":567,"date":"2012-02-25T13:17:02","date_gmt":"2012-02-25T13:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/?p=567"},"modified":"2012-02-25T13:17:02","modified_gmt":"2012-02-25T13:17:02","slug":"my-d800-preorder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markdavidscott.com\/?p=567","title":{"rendered":"My D800 Preorder"},"content":{"rendered":"

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(Image is Nikon’s, and links to their D800 page). In an\u00a0earlier post<\/a>\u00a0on the announcement of the D4, I decided that the D4 was too big and too expensive to reasonably consider – and that the D800 was looking like it wasn’t the camera for me.\u00a0Almost three weeks ago, on February 7th, Nikon announced the D800 (and D800E) full frame cameras. And in spite of what I had said earlier, I pre-ordered a D800 the day of the announcement. \u00a0Did something change my mind – why did I preorder?<\/p>\n

Well, pre-ordering alone doesn’t take much guts – you get to pore over all the samples, analysis, and early user feedback in the month or so that follows until the camera actually starts shipping, and if you don’t like what you see, you can cancel at no cost. And if Nikon’s past launches have been indicative, there won’t be enough D800s anyways, so it’d probably be trivial to sell it perhaps even at a profit if it didn’t meet expectations. I intensely dislike secondary markets that offer new goods at inflated prices (because it results in lots of non-customers buying solely to make a profit, making it more difficult and expensive for legitimate fans to actually get the products in question, without providing any value back to the product creator – see the first year of the Nintendo Wii for examples), but it does take any risk out of pre-ordering.<\/p>\n

However, as I’ll explain below, I went a step further and actually committed to this for real. Given that the D800 isn’t intended to address my primary need – good enough high ISO performance to shoot the kids in ambient indoor light at shutter speeds that accommodate their constant state of motion – why did I commit anyways?<\/p>\n

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There were several factors:<\/p>\n